An airline traveller often has to change airplanes at an intermediate airport. In these cases, a baggage handling group at the airport unloads baggage from the incoming flight and transfers it to the departing flight so that the baggage will arrive at the same destination as does the traveller. This operation can become somewhat complicated because there will be several flights connecting with the incoming flight, and the departure times of the connecting flights vary. In those situations where the connecting flight is being "made up" when the incoming flight arrives, the bags can simply be transferred to the connecting flight. In those situations where the connecting flight is not yet being made up the bags are called "early bags", and they must be stored until the make-up of the connecting flight is "opened."
At the typical airport, the make-up for a flight is opened 5 about two hours prior to the scheduled departure time of the flight. Thus, a bag arriving at the airport more than two hours prior to the scheduled departure time of the connecting flight is defined to be an early bag. Larger airports may require storage of up to 4000 early bags, and these bags can be from one-half hour to 24 hours early.
Presently, one preferred method for storing early bags is to load the bags onto carts and to place the carts in a storage area until a make-up is opened. The bags are then removed from the carts and placed on the airport's baggage conveyor system. This is a very labor-intensive and inefficient system. Another known method is to provide the conveyor system with storage lanes for the early bags. Thus, bags for flights having make-up times within a certain period of time can be loaded onto a storage lane and discharged into the conveyor system when that time period has expired. A problem with this system is that the opening time of a flight can change, which means that all of the bags originally arranged to be discharged into the conveyor system at a particular time must be physically retrieved and reordered. Or, a passenger can decide to change plans and request that his bag be provided to him, which requires a worker physically to search the storage lane for the bag.